RELATIONS BETWEEN AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY 533 



individual and public rights, and that there is no prerogative apart 

 from or in opposition to the nation. 



I have insisted at some length on the peculiar character of the 

 Hungarian monarchy because it contains the most distinctive feature 

 of our constitution and may be considered as the masterpiece of 

 that political genius in which few nations, if any, have surpassed 

 our people. Placed in a situation where a strong executive was 

 essential to national safety, our forefathers had to solve the problem 

 to make prerogative as efficient as could be for its national mission, 

 and at the same time innocuous to liberty. And either I am totally 

 misled by patriotic self-conceit, or that difficult problem found a 

 better solution in Hungary than in any other country placed in 

 similar circumstances. 



Time fails me to expatiate on the development of the other con- 

 stitutional powers, to show how national assemblies (originally 

 mass meetings of all freemen) evolved into representative bodies; 

 how these bodies grew gradually stronger and extended the sphere 

 of their rights; how a powerful organism of county, town, and city 

 self-government was developed on quite original principles, and 

 became in hard times an unconquerable stronghold of national 

 liberty. But a few words must be said as to the question: Whom 

 do we refer to by the name of the Hungarian people? In other words, 

 In whom were all those rights vested which formed the popular branch 

 of the constitution? 



To an American now, even to a modern European audience, 

 such a question may seem preposterous. In whom, indeed, should 

 popular rights be vested but in the whole people, including every 

 citizen of the country? But we are considering now a medieval 

 constitution, and a political establishment founded on conquest; 

 which means that we speak of an epoch which knew liberty only in 

 the form of privilege and of circumstances peculiarly adverse to 

 universal equality. 



Now, and this is one of the most important facts in our history, 

 privilege in a racial sense never existed in Hungary. When our 

 forefathers conquered their new home, they found different races on 

 its soil, and as late as the eighteenth century, immigration brought 

 new racial intermixture into our country. How, then, did we deal 

 with that mass of heterogeneous elements? National unity --just 

 like concentration of power --was, and still is, essential to the 

 permanence of any political establishment in that part of Europe, 

 which has to face the first onset of all eastern dangers; that there 

 should exist a strong national unity on that particular spot was, 

 and is even, a condition of safety to all occidental Europe. But 

 how was it to be effected among a chaotic mass of racial individuality? 

 History of conquest shows two typical ways of solving that problem. 



